Three Series, One Reason I’m Building Them
Starting Monday, the coaching I never had becomes something you can subscribe to.
Starting Monday, three new series go live here. Two are survival guides for a leader’s first years, one for new principals and one for new superintendents. The third is a series on systems-oriented leadership, built for anyone already in a seat who keeps fixing the same problem on the surface without understanding why it keeps coming back.
The Field Guides exist because I did not have one. Montgomery County gave me a formal training structure as a new administrator, mentors, a cohort, and regular instruction on specific problems rather than general encouragement. That structure disappeared the moment I left the principalship, and nothing replaced it as I moved into a district-level role or a superintendency. The Field Guides are the structure I am building for the people walking into those seats now, organized around the specific traps a first-year leader sets for themselves, from entry planning through the relationships that determine whether the rest of the job goes well.
The Systems series solves a different problem. A leader can look directly at a structural issue and still not recognize it as structural, because the organization has trained everyone to treat it as a series of unrelated events. An accountability office can spend years producing reports for the state while never building a single tool a principal actually uses, and nobody notices because each report gets filed on time. That series is for leaders who already know how to run a district and want language for the pattern underneath the paperwork.
None of this replaces what happens here for free. My stories continue every week, including the mistakes. What changes Monday is that some of those mistakes come with the fix attached.
Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools from 2018 to 2026 and Wilson County Schools from 2011 to 2016. Subscribe for weekly posts on educational leadership, equity, and district transformation.
